Is ZFS on Linux Ready for Prime Time?

Over at ClusterHQ, Richard Yao writes that ZFS on Linux is ready for prime time.

I believe the ZoL is production ready for the following reasons:

Key ZFS data integrity features work on Linux like they do on other platforms.

ZFS runtime stability on Linux is comparable to other filesystems, with certain exceptions that I document below.

ZoL is at near feature parity with ZFS on other platforms.

ZFS on Linux has been under development since 2008 with half of all commits having occurred in the past 2 years. The current release is 0.6.3 and the next release will be 0.6.4 later this year. The plan is to continue performing 0.6.x releases with distribution maintainers doing backports until the /dev/zfs ioctl interface is stabilized. At that point, the project will release 1.0. New releases will be 1.x while 1.x.y maintenance releases will be done to back port fixes like is done by the Linux kernel stable maintainers.

In this related video from LUG 2014, Marc Stearman from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory presents: LLNL — Production Plans and Best Practices. Livermore is using a novel implementation of Lustre on top of ZFS. View the Slides (PDF).

Ready to make the plunge? ClusterHQ has a follow-up post comparing ZFSOnLinux’s implementation of the POSIX filesystem API with that of other file systems.

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